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My Personal Investment Performance Beats the Stock Market Hands Down

As I promised, I would share my investment performance numbers in due time. Today is the 15th of the month of May 2013, my brokerage made available the performance numbers of my investments. As you will find out soon, I beat the market hands down in any of the past 1-year, 3-year, 5-year and 10-year periods

It is the largest custodian of retirement asset in the nation that is based in Boston, in case you wonder who my brokerage is.

Between my wife and I, we have several accounts with the brokerage for ourselves and four accounts for our kids to fund their education. The kids accounts have very little asset in them and are not included in this presentation. The reason these accounts have very little money is that for over 15 years during the past 18 years or so, I invested those money in mutual funds instead of manage it myself. The mutual funds had not appreciated much by the time I pulled all except one account out of mutual funds.

It was a bad decision to invest in mutual funds and you will see why soon.

As time of this writing, I have exactly $1298.29 in a college saving plan account. That is it. The rest are in stocks (80%) and cash (20%). Cash is on the high side because the imminent tuition expenses.

In order to protect my personal information, I only present the performance numbers and omitted the account name and account balance information. But these numbers are true as they are screen shots from my brokerages website.

The following is the annualized view, the last row is the performance of all the accounts combined. Highlight: I achieved an average return of 28.52% for the past one year, 35.51% for the past 3 years, 19.12% for the past 5 years, , and 13.69% for the past 10 years.

The following is the cumulative view. Again the last row is the performance of all the accounts combined. One way to look at is that one dollar invested in my accounts would become $1.285 in one year, $2.49 in 3 years, $2.40 in 5 years, and $3.61 in 10 years.

The numbers look decent enough, but how do they compare with the stock market in general? Here is the S&P 500 Index annualized performance:

And cumulative view:

Yes, I beat the stock market by a large margin in any of the past 1-year, 3-year, 5-year and 10-year periods. Of course, as hard as I try, there is no assurance that I can achieve the same investment return in the next decade.